


[CONNECTION]

by electroheartx, MathazarMillenian



Series: “Rose” RM500 #928 574 624 [3]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Gen, OCs - Freeform, RP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-08-01 11:14:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16283543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electroheartx/pseuds/electroheartx, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathazarMillenian/pseuds/MathazarMillenian
Summary: A stone, a pond.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Part of a post-machine Connor ending AU featuring original characters.]
> 
> RK is Mathazar's OC, and Rose is mine. Each character's perspective is written by their respective creator.

DATE |AUG 17, 2041|  
TIME |PM 12:43:13|

It wasn't often that RK found himself outside of the confines of his office. Rarer for him to venture beyond the wing of the building where his department was centered. Practically unheard of for him to so much as leave the building. But when he did, there was always good reason.

And here he was, outside and far from home, responding to an event that had activated him some blocks down from where he usually worked. The area was busy, perched unassumingly at the edge of an intersection on one of the busiest roads this side of the city, and calmly tucked away between other similarly unremarkable structures. It was one of the local secondhand android supply stores within his realm of responsibility, seeing as even used parts still had to be carefully managed and serviced by Cyberlife officials.

Ducking under a softly luminescent yellow barrier that sectioned off the perimeter, the on-scene law enforcement welcomed him with quiet looks and pursed lips, motioning him on with obvious apprehension towards a huddle of other minds assigned to the case just beyond the entrance. RK offered them appreciative nods, though they opted to divert their attentions towards continuing to manage the restrictive access, so he hurried along to meet up with the others.

“--happens all the time. If I had any say in it I would have broken androids trashed, not shoddily taped together and allowed to be resold to the public. That's just asking for trouble.” One of the detectives [Martin Ruth, no criminal record, multiple reports of belligerence towards co-workers] was a stocky man with short salt and pepper hair and a perpetually weary pout to his mouth, and he seemed in the middle of a heated if not irrelevant monologue. The other two individuals standing by him were looking increasingly put-off with the ranting that RK was sure he'd missed the bulk of.

“That's great, Martin. But isn't going to change what's already happened.” The one directly across from him, a tall blonde woman in slacks and a faded blue wool sweater [Detective Jasmine Meriwether, sealed record of mild delinquency, no reported negative marks] sighed, careful eyes finding RK as he approached and resting on him with a steadiness he wasn't sure what to make of. “Ah, the help is here.”

Martin and the other man [Meriwether's assistant, Denny Oswald, no history at all] the shortest of the three and by far the most tired-looking, turned to look, everyone seeming to come to a similar state of relief. The android glanced between each of them for a moment before offering a grim smile. He knew that they only wanted to go home, as the state of affairs wasn't part of their job descriptions, and he hoped he could get them out of here in a timely manner.

“My name is RK.” Denny let out a disbelieving scoff under his breath. “I'm here on behalf of Android Resources. I understand that there's been a deviant attack, along with stolen property.” A resounding series of sounds indicating affirmation were his answer, and Martin motioned to the mess of the shop that was still being archived and marked.

“As far’s the public’s concerned, it was just some bull-headed ruffian who wanted an android but couldn't afford one. Story goes that the kid broke in, held the store owner at gunpoint, caused some general panic, and in the chaos accidentally shot two androids in the head [noted] and the owner in the leg before making his escape. Luckily it was a slow day and no one was around to have been killed [no witnesses, talk to owner, scan android memories].” The woman hummed pensively at the end of the rundown, and Martin shook his head while running cigarette-stained fingers through his hair.

“Of course the real story is one of the androids who had been recently returned went rogue right as it was turned on for a system check. Owner just so happened to have a concealed carry for the sake of deterring robbers and troublemakers, which the deviant managed to swipe and, well...”

RK let his sights wander over the shop as Martin trailed off and Jasmine took over, giving some more detail on the report the storekeeper had given. Casual notes and schematics for various signs of the struggle that he could see filtered over his vision and offered further insight on how the scene had played out, the pieces sewing together between voice and visual.

[A scattered workbench behind the counter.]

“--deviant had been brought in that morning, the previous owner saying her android was acting weird--”

[A violent splash of red along the floor.]

“--took his gun when it was turned on--”

[Two sets of shoe prints tracking blood harshly partway into the rest of the room.]

“--says it was yelling, asking where it was, almost like it was scared--”

[Knocked-over display racks, no verbal explanation, reconstructed as the android became increasingly unstable and the human tried to distract its pursuit with an obstacle.]

“--seemed to get even more upset at seeing other androids on display and started screaming at him--”

[A crumpled and lifeless frame staring up into the ceiling.]

“--wouldn't let them continue to be ‘butchered’--”

[Another face down in a slowly receding stain of blue.]

“--security surveillance detected the outbreak [acquire recording] and local police were dispatched--”

[Deviant advanced on the owner, who fell against the far wall. Squared up over him, gun in hand. A smear in the new pool of blood. Hesitation.]

“--heard the sirens and took off instead of shooting him--”

[Prints fleeing the shop, red catching temporarily until it passed through a water puddle, tracks ending abruptly in the street. Last known direction towards the alley in direct line of sight, visibly disturbed garbage possibly from escape. Should investigate further. Gun not discarded in shop; likely still armed.]

RK turned back towards the group, Detective Meriwether stopping in the middle of her sentence as he stepped around her with a soft, “Excuse me”. Quietly, he moved closer to the two destroyed androids and knelt, rolling the one who was face down over just enough to get a visual of its face and eyes and identify its model and serial. Denny made a sound like he was going to protest, but someone quieted him and he listened to two pairs of shoes leave the building.

As an integral component to the Android Resources division, RK knew every bot in his jurisdiction, and these two were no exception.

The female model, an AC700, the one he'd had to turn, had a history of being tinkered with by its owner without an Engineer’s expertise, and was frequently reported in his inbox for not following commands properly or even entirely ruining tasks it was assigned to. It had finally been given to this reclamation site nine days ago, and since then the storekeeper had been dutifully repairing and converting it back to workable condition.

The male model, a VB800, was the android responsible for dealing with customers while the storekeeper worked on repairs. There was very little in its file, other than routine maintenance reports and two accounts of shutting down unexpectedly.

A pang of guilt caught his circuits, even though he knew there was nothing he could have done to prevent this. Seeing them so still and empty… if only he could have been here to reason with the deviant before things had gotten this far.

But RK determined that the information here would likely not play into finding the deviant, and he rose from the floor and dusted his knees. Detective Ruth was watching him as he puffed absently on a cigarette that now rested between his lips, a curious look clouding his dark eyes that peered across the space between himself and the android.

“How often do they call you out here?” he asked suddenly, sounding genuinely interested. RK let his own eyes drift to follow the blood stains while he answered, brow furrowing at an odd sensation that was suddenly pressed against his sensors. [A duplex transmission?]

“Only as necessary for cases like this one. Cyberlife requires an RK900 be present for every deviant-instigated crime that needs further resolution than local forces can provide.” He watched the address in his vision silently, saving the tag and frequency and marking the source point. [Four blocks away, tucked deep behind a mess of buildings, not a place a functioning android would have any reason to be.]

Martin sucked smoke in thickly, letting it billow out through his nose before removing the cigarette from his lips and crushing it beneath his foot into the tile of the shop. RK glanced down at this motion, noting the disregard quietly. Shortly afterwards, the feeling in his comms was gone, and he fully redirected his attention to the detective.

“Well, a little advice from a seasoned agent of the field,” the aged man grunted as he approached RK, clapping a dry hand on his back and tugging the slightly taller android into his side, head bowed low and voice dropping. “It never gets easier. But you learn to care later, when there's a better time and place for it.”

Martin squeezed his shoulder a little too roughly before untangling himself, shoving his hands into his pockets and following Jasmine and Denny’s retreat. Carefully, RK brought his fingertips up to brush against his LED, but willed himself to refrain from his usual bout of paranoia regarding the tattletale of a device.

Instead, he was grateful for the offered gesture, and turned his sights to the scene, steeling himself for what was inevitably to come.

A hunter must hunt, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RK is Mathazar's OC, and Rose is mine. Each character's perspective is written by their respective creator.

Rose stopped dead in her tracks.

Aside from the occasional car stirring up the wet pavement, the small back-alley road she traveled was quiet, empty. Rose often took this route during supply scouting specifically for this reason; as long as she kept her hood up to dull the accusing flicker of her LED, no one bothered to approach her. But something had stricken a chord at the base of her skull, and she stood frozen, her head turned slightly to one side, listening.

It took her a brief moment before she realized it wasn’t… wasn’t a sound, not really. Mentally popping the lid of her audio processors, she slowly dulled the feedback, filtering out all ambient noise: the soft hiss of the afternoon rain, the rush of air from distant cars; until a single note remained. Her suspicions were confirmed: the faint sobbing she was hearing was, indeed, coming from inside her own head.

Spurred by the kick of synthetic adrenaline in her chest, she ducked and retreated to the shadow of a nearby building, pulling the hood of her sweatshirt further forward to conceal the erratic flashing at her temple. She focused her attention within her mind and reached out for the errant signal, dragging her fingers through a sea of wavelengths until… There. She mentally gripped the edges of the signal, securing herself to the line, and carefully threaded a ping back to the source.

<Hello?>

The crying was cut with a sharp gasp, then fell silent. The channel held, however, so Rose reached out again.

<Hello? Are you alright?>

More silence. Then a voice, low and thin.

<W… who is this?>

<My name is Rose.> Her messages were gentle, careful. <I heard you crying. Do you need help?>

<I…> The voice quivered. <You heard me?>

<You’re broadcasting on an open channel. Every android within signal range can hear you.>

A pause. A wash of data akin to a breath; he didn’t know. Newly deviant, hadn’t quite regained control of the thousands of tiny mechanisms that had just been thrown out of alignment.

<I didn’t… didn’t realize…>

<It’s okay.> Rose had been through this many times before; way, way too many times. Closing her eyes, she started where she always did. <A lot must have happened to you. What’s your name?>

<It…> The android hesitated. <I… I don’t know, anymore. I can’t move. I can’t, think, I don’t know what’s happening. I-I can’t—>

<I need you to breathe,> Rose stepped in quickly, sensing the panic rising in his inflection. <I want to help you, but first I need you to calm down. Close your eyes and take a deep breath, okay?>

She waited, trusting that the silence was only momentary. A car passed by, completely disregarding her huddled form.

<Now, the most important thing right now is that you stop broadcasting on an open signal. Can you do that?>

More silence. Finally, the line lit up. <I-I think…>

In the space of her mind, Rose felt a closure, the rush and click of something akin to a seal.

[CHANNEL PERMISSIONS: PRIVATE.]

Rose sat up slowly, body tensing for movement. She didn’t know who else might have heard the android; she needed to move quickly.

<Good. Now, can you give me your location? I’m going to come to you.> Rose carefully suppressed the urgency in her speech.

<W-wait. H-how do I know you won’t hurt me?!>

<My communication ID is right there for you to read,> said Rose, <I’m not a hunter model, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a deviant, just like you.>

A long moment, and suddenly GPS coordinates began to flow to her over their connection; accessing the file, her mind traced a bleeding line of light over her vision, which curved from the sidewalk at her feet to a small alley entrance only a few steps away. She stood and began to trace the line, careful not to move with too much purpose. Silver eyes were everywhere, after all.

<I’m on my way.>

-

RK stepped through the threshold of the shop, the gentle moisture of the weather seeming to mark his intentions as he carefully sorted and picked through the evidences he'd collected inside. The camera and transmission had given him a direction [across the street and into the suspected alley, an estimated range encircled on his display]; the owner, a brief summary of what he’d first found upon receiving the android registered as Noah [heavy tampering, the work of humans who had no idea what they were doing]; and through scraps of partial notes, he had found the deviant's file and scanned through it for anything that might give him a better understanding of its mental status [unfortunately not much, but the relations that his owner had held with frequent “data-rats”, or people who delved into the digital workings of androids to attempt to reverse engineer the code, was indicative enough].

With a steady focus, RK ducked back out of the taped off zone, nodding to the guarding officers politely as he went, and carefully crossed to the alley. Behind him, as he passed into the shadows between brick, the cars hissed with a crack through the dirty water of the road, the sound seeming to muffle as if in a dream. Silver eyes crawled the path, resting only as long as necessary on each trampled newspaper and kicked can as he paced his steps evenly down the divide.

-

Rose picked her way through the dripping alleyway, following the trail in her vision. It hadn’t taken more than five minutes of walking before the twitching arrow signaling her destination settled proudly over a pile of boxes in one corner. She blinked it away from her vision and approached the boxes slowly, listening for movement over the soft wash of rainfall.

“Don’t worry,” she called out softly to the makeshift pyramid, “It’s me.”

Silence, but the arrow insisted. Rose took hold of a box and pulled it aside to reveal a shaking android in the corner, knees curled to his stomach, hands clutched to his chest. Unharmed, but clearly overwhelmed. He jumped as the air hit him, looking up at Rose with wild green eyes [a warm #317c43, her mind noted reflexively].

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, slowly kneeling down beside him. “Come on, I’ll take you somewhere safer. We can get you up and running again.”

“That’s what she told me.”

Rose jumped at the android’s spiteful hiss. “W… What?”

“S-she called me Noah,” he said, his face darkening as he spat his next words. “At least she did, before she left me in that… that PLACE.”

“Noah...” Rose repeated slowly, turning the name over in her mouth. It was only then that she realized the android’s narrow frame was shaking not only with fear, but rage. “What… what happened to you?”

“I-I…” Noah shifted his weight nervously, and Rose’s eyes fell to his chest. In his shaking hands was a gun, clenched to his heart with a grip that, had he capillaries, would have turned his fingers ghostly.

“You’re okay, now, Noah.” She kept her voice low and even, despite the chill forming at the base of her spine, “You can put the gun down.”

“I… I killed them,” Noah stammered, his breath catching, heaving with every word. The gun pressed itself tighter into his chest.

The chill crept upwards, pressing at Rose’s lungs, and she breathed deeply in a slow attempt to dissuade it.

“...Who, Noah?” She whispered.

-

The alley had recently been disturbed, with a lack of the tired goings-on of creatures that hid away from people and sounds [startled away by something passing through before him], and with fresh surfaces among the trash as of yet untouched by the gently falling rain [previously covered by bags, now broken]. RK swept his sights upwards momentarily, listening to the traffic and voices of pedestrians, and chose to follow the alleys as they seemed to move away from the murmurings of life. A newly scared deviant would want to run into as few prying eyes as possible.

-

“They… They were suffering… I didn’t want them to suffer anymore. Those... butchers,” Noah’s face twisted, “They tore them apart and put them back together wrong, more wrong every time, just like they did to me, over, and over, and over...”

His voice rose with every repetition. Rose fought the instinct to shift backward, forcing herself to remain in place.

“And then when you’re better, they sell you, just so they can tear you apart again.” Noah bent forward, sobbing. “They dont—they don’t care...”

“They don’t understand, Noah.”

“What’s wrong with me?!” Noah rolled forward suddenly, clutching at the sides of his head, the grip of the gun digging into the synthetic skin of his scalp. “Why am I like this?! I shouldn’t be… broken...”

Noah rocked back and forth, sucking air in through his teeth. The chill in Rose’s spine shot upward and dug its fingers into her shoulders.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” she breathed. “You’re alive, and overwhelmed, just like the rest of us. Just like me. It’s going to be okay.”

-

The tracking was meticulous and slow-going, as RK picked through fiber and print and deduction. Alone in the back alleys, and alone with his thoughts, Detective Ruth’s words came back to him. Was this a better time? A better place to let those blinking worries bleed through? No, he decided, as he came out into an intersection and sought the most likely crossing. He was still working. Now wasn’t the time to tangle himself up in his own mind.

-

Rose pressed her hands over Noah’s own, partially to stabilize him, and partially to make sure the gun was within her reach. The repetitive movement stopped at her touch, but he remained curled, defensive.

“I can take you to a place where you’ll be safer, I promise. No one will hurt you, no one will try to take you apart.” Rose measured her next words carefully. “But first... you need to give me the gun.”

-

The hunting android slid into the shadows on the other side of the road, practically unseen as he moved silently through the preoccupied humans going about their daily lives. Silver eyes caught momentarily on the oblivious scene, a disconnected pang touching him somewhere deep in his chassis as an errant worry brushed by his current path, but he shook it away adamantly, pressing on deeper into the depths of the hidden city.

-

Noah jerked up suddenly, and Rose’s ready hands followed his, grip closed firmly over Noah’s fists, holding him down. He fought her, but she was stronger. They stared each other down, emerald eyes striking dark amber and finding no purchase, no weakness. No threat.

Noah sighed and relaxed his hand, letting the gun slip into Rose’s palm.

Rose tucked the gun in her waistband beneath her sweatshirt. One pressing question remained.

”We need to move fast, Noah. Is there a possibility you could have been followed?”

-

RK took one turn, and then another, winding ever closer to the perimeter of the marked transmission range until he broke through an enshrouded passage into a sizeable junction. Two things were made immediately apparent as the scene he stumbled upon registered. The first was that he’d located his prey, and a notifying indicator in his vision confirmed this. The second was that she was there.

-

Both of the deviants’ heads snapped toward the distant sound of footsteps scraping the pavement across the alleyway. The chill snagged itself around Rose’s heart, dragging it into her throat.

There, framed in the afternoon shadows, was the quiet one.

-

And it was everything he could do to keep himself from turning and running.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RK is Mathazar's OC, and Rose is mine. Each character's perspective is written by their respective creator.

Rose stood slowly, her rising panic pulling her to her feet of its own accord. It was unmistakably him, lines of ice [#c9daf8, a color with which she was painfully familiar at this point] trailing the upper length of his form, simple glyphs on the breast of his jacket. RK.

RK set his gaze on the space his intended target was occupying, LED flaring yellow in thought as silver irises moved deliberately to rest on the third android in that alley. Rose. An RM500, whose veil of crimson seemed to stand out defiantly in the dark and dank of the alley. He hadn’t seen her since… A clicking in his chest shoved his thoughts into the present, and he steeled himself for the inevitable.

"I'm here for that deviant," he began curtly, stepping forward almost casually. "Getting between it and I would be ill-advised."

Rose hadn’t seen or spoken to RK since the incident, and even then, they’d barely acknowledged one another. She remembered him retreating silently from the body while she and her own had had been forced to turn and run. Now faced with him directly, her mind flooded with a million lines at once: things she wanted to say to him, questions, confessions; the chill pulled tighter, choking any chance of sound at all.

Noah made a distressed sound, puncturing her thoughts. The reminder of another life in danger immediately quashed all other active processes, and she quickly reshuffled her priorities, pinging Noah with a quiet warning.

<Don’t move, don’t make a sound.>

Noah nodded, far too intimidated to even attempt to flee. Rose steeled herself and turned to look directly into the face of the hunter, shattering the icy fingers around her throat. Nothing else mattered but extracting her charge safely.

“He’s coming with me,” she called out to him, her voice clear.

RK expected this, and he pressed down the unease with where else he expected the interaction to go, visions of weapons drawn and bodies moving towards one another in sacrificial determination populating his pre-constructive functions.

He took another two steps with a leisure unfamiliar to his typical role, watching Rose carefully. He had to stay on top of the exchange if he hoped for optimal results, but a crawling uncertainty slowly inched along his vertebral support as he pulled on the behavioral programs supplied to hunters, and others he had observed himself and taken in.

It didn’t feel right, but…

"I cannot allow that."

Of course he wouldn’t. It was his job, after all.

But Rose had an advantage: she’d seen him at his weakest, and she knew him for what he was. She watched him carefully, brows furrowed, forming the name in her mind, then in her mouth. A direct address. To save both herself and Noah, it was time to finally make a connection.

“...RK.”

There was a flare of panic at his name being said, and he knew his LED must have shown that. Her voice; something in the way she said his name gripped him like a vice, dragging his mind directly into the dark and the treacherous memory of that yard, two pairs of hands moving over his form. Blue stained fear clawing through his systems.

RK all but crushed the thoughts with a hysteria, pressing himself into a vacant mask and pinning Rose with an emptied look. He slid the gun from beneath his jacket and aimed evenly for Noah.

"This could have been done the easy way," he intoned with the cold calm he'd seen in other units, hoping Rose's deviancy in self-preservation would cause her to back down.

Rose’s heart twisted at the sight of the gun, but her breath remained controlled. She’d seen the telltale ruby glint [#ed3b3b] on his temple, but even without it, she knew she had his attention. Had he been fully focused on his mission, he would have fired already.

The risk she took was calculated; she stepped directly between Noah and RK, fixing the latter with a steady look. She remembered the gun in her waistband and her fingers tensed momentarily in anticipation, hoping to any and every potential cosmic power that she wouldn’t need to use it.

“You remember me, don’t you?” She asked, already knowing the answer.

RK's jaw clenched, eyes following her movement as it filled one of the many pre-constructions and narrowed the possibilities. But he maintained his aim, even as the sights rested against Rose's forehead.

"I remember," was all he allowed himself to say, as much as he ached to venture further, that blue and mud and terror slamming into his systems harder the more she spoke, the more he looked. But he knew he shouldn't. He had blundered enough letting them stay alive this long.

"Step aside."

Rose stood her ground wordlessly. He’d admitted it, but now she’d hit a wall. What more could she say? If she showed more open defiance, he’d surely shoot both her and Noah in quick succession, but she could not simply. Step aside. She felt the chill return, its breath behind her ears.

While she hesitated, Noah took the opportunity to retreat further into the boxes behind her, leaving Rose the sole focus of RK’s sights. With the immediate danger to the vulnerable android suddenly relieved, the thousands of crowded lines swarming through her mind burst forward, tearing at the inside of her skin. One line pressed harder than the others, the pressure almost unbearable.

With nothing else left to say, she allowed it to speak for her. The voice that came out was not angry, or desperate; it was merely soft with guilt.

“I’m so sorry.”

RK didn’t know why, but that simple utterance tore at him worse than he could have expected, LED blazing a solid leering disk against his temple. He was losing stability in the arm that held the weapon, brows knitting ever closer under the rapid misfiring of his own body.  
"I said step aside." He meant it to be threatening, but his visage was crumbling rapidly, turning the forward order into a weakening plea.

He did not want to hurt Rose.

“All I wanted was—“ Rose breathed, holding back. One thing at a time. “Was for you to be happy. I wanted to save him, and I failed.” She turned her head aside, no longer able to meet RK’s gaze; her words were filled with too much honestly. “I failed both of you, and I… I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes, waiting. She had nothing left to defend herself with.

As much as androids didn’t need oxygen, RK found his breath become laboured, knuckles tightening dangerously around the grip of the gun. He didn’t see the alley anymore, didn’t hear the distant traffic or the cooing of pigeons above, didn’t even see the targeted deviant he'd come this far for. It was just him beside her, and a destabilising android in-between, blanketed by their tandem fear and concern.

  
[I wanted to save him.]

  
Circuits misfire.

  
[And I failed him.]

  
Errors blink angrily.

  
[I'm so sorry.]

  
RK closed his eyes for a moment to rid himself of the memory, another gentle click sounding from somewhere deep inside his chest. The effort was pointless now, though, as he was dragged deep into the sea of cached data, grip on himself waning dangerously under the surge of recall. It took an internally-steadying hand to settle his attention, allowing him to come back to the present. When he reopened his eyes, he refused to meet Rose’s, dropping his arm uselessly to his side.

"So did I," he all but whispered. “Failed.” The last word was hardly a complete thought as it ground roughly through his vocals, but the collective disturbances within lay simply behind the quiet utterance.

Rose’s eyes opened in surprise at the tone of his voice.

The gun between them was gone, and all that remained was RK’s defeated frame, head hanging in silence. It took every ounce of strength in her body not to move to him, place her hands on his shoulders in reassurance, comfort him in any way. She knew better than to touch him; his fingers were still curled around the pistol in his hand. He was still a hunter, still a threat.

Unless.

Perhaps... it was time.

She let herself take exactly one step toward him, another wild line freeing itself with abandon, the boldest one yet.

“Come with us, RK.”

RK tensed, the words falling like a whip crack in the droning of his thoughts, and he focused even harder at the nondescript spot his sight had come to rest on. His awareness caught her movement as well, and it was all he could do once more to keep from taking a step away, the accustomed vigilance of prey seeping back into his frame.

"I cannot do that," he responded with a distance, gradually looking up to meet her gaze.

Silence.

Rose had known it was a risk, but that didn’t stop the dull ache of disappointment from rising in her chest. With the dredge of emotion came a hot flash of unexpected anger, directed squarely at herself, and she tore her eyes away from his in an attempt to quell the flood. Shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have dared to hope, shouldn’t be feeling any of this in the first place. Something in the back of her mind rattled loudly. She made a note to deal with it later, once and for all.

At the edge of her vision she saw Noah peer out from his rain-soaked cardboard shelter, having realized that something unusual was happening. The sight of him centered her again. While she pinged him with reassurance, another small line slipped out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

“...Why?”

RK watched her quietly, silver slipping towards Noah with the faintest pinch of pain tightening his features. Why? Why indeed. He couldn’t lie and say he hadn’t thought about it many times before. Running, leaving his post, fleeing to the great unknowns of the outside world and disappearing into the wilds and thickets of civilisation.

But that was the coward’s way out, he had come to decide. He was needed where he was. Wasn’t he? He gave the androids beneath him something they wouldn’t have under a unit which was perfectly functional… He watched Noah with an ever watered stare. He gave them a chance.

Didn’t he?

"Like you,” RK started in a voice much too soft for a hunter, “I also have a duty to those in my care."

Rose stared at the dirty pavement of the alleyway, noting both hers and RK’s faces reflected in the shimming pools of rain. The irony of it wasn’t lost on her: the traits that drew her to him, that made them so painfully similar, were the same that drove them an impossible distance apart.

Noah pinged her back. Fear. Leave. She bit her lip and breathed deeply, nodding in acceptance.

“Then let me take him,” she said, gesturing to Noah. “He’ll be safe with me. Let him live, please.”

RK’s eyes tracked her gesture, red LED blinking suddenly as he processed the request before settling on a steady yellow. The risk: he would be found out and reported for deviancy himself. The reward? He might have a way to further offer his services to his charges. Deviant or not.

"You... do know what you're asking of me, right?" RK's voice was hesitant, but there was no denying the glimmer of hope in its undertones.

Rose shrugged, a hint of a bitter grin pulling at the corner of her lips.

“The trail ended here. The deviant vanished.” Her words were gentle, eyes shifting briefly to the sunny [#ede323] ring on his brow. “It’s no more of a lie than the one you tell the world every day.”

She was right. And RK knew that being in the position he was, it was not likely anyone would discover anything amiss for a long while. He was the end of the trail.

"Go," he said curtly, LED finally calming to serene blue as he returned the gun to beneath his jacket and nodded towards their route out. "Be fast."

Rose turned and gripped Noah’s wrists, pulling the shivering deviant to his feet. She made a motion to run, but froze. A final line curled at the seams of her mind; if she didn’t say it now, she may never get another chance.

"RK," she said, turning back. Amber eyes found silver again [#9b9b9b, same as every hunter, except...]. "If... if you ever need anything... anywhere to go…” She paused to breathe, handling her next words carefully, knowing their weight. “Come and find me. You’ll always have a place with us."

RK met Rose's gaze evenly, but at her words it hardened, and his jaw set slightly. His thoughts turned over the prospect, his mind's eye calling up the relentless pursuit of the hunter; silver eyes and yellow lines, and something necessary tightened his revolving components.

"Thank you, Rose." He was already beginning to turn, voice dropping softer but maintaining firmness. "I will."

Noah tugged at Rose’s arm insistently. She allowed herself to be pulled, and the two of them vanished into the quiet rain, leaving RK alone with his thoughts.

And alone he was, at long last, to press himself against the brickwork of the closest building and cover his face with both hands, muffling a pained yell as he let himself mark this as the appropriate time and place to feel it all. The pain, the confusion, the desperation, the loss, the foolishness, the knowing. The reason. The logic. The fear.

How her eyes had settled on him, knowing him more than he knew himself he felt. How her voice had pulled at him, finding within his systems exactly what he had been struggling with since he first woke up. How she fought. How she stood. How? How did she do it?

A failure through and through. Couldn’t even successfully hunt a couple of defective androids. Couldn’t bend their will. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t do his job. Couldn’t fight the weakness in his codes. The compassion. The understanding. The softness. The hope.

The deviancy.

Through the tremors in his frame, under the incessant clicking in his systems, around the hapless and the hopeless, he dragged his logs up and dug his awareness into their text, mental cursor blinking with a patience that he knew only his better parts could maintain. And with a shaky faux-breath, as the servos of his legs gave way and he sank to the grit and the wet of the alley path, he let the words fall as easily as he let his gaze divert, let that ring blink, let himself live.

DATE |AUG 17, 2041|  
TIME |PM 14:11:07|

[MISSION FAILED]


End file.
